Bonus Post: Apple is Pandering to Dullards

Or, how Apple envisions its products in the brave new workplace

Once upon a time I didn’t get fired; but I will always wonder whether I would’ve, had I stayed. I was overcommitted, working three jobs, preparing for a major life change, and experiencing burnout. In fact, I was so over-committed I didn’t identify the burnout until three months after leaving, and

Jonathan Malesic

’s work was instrumental in helping me recognize the signs. I liked that job, I enjoyed the people I worked with—we’d traveled together all over the world—and I believed in what we were doing. But the handwriting was on the wall. At the last couple of monthly check-in meetings, where we’d share our progress, I was telling good stories but making few contributions. And then came an opportunity that required me to leave that role anyway; so we parted on good terms. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that, for my last four months there, I had been a deadbeat.

But what if I hadn’t had to leave that role for non-work-related reasons, and what if I’d had a magic gizmo that could make me look engaged at work, like I was still making a valuable contribution? How long would I have stayed? And what sort of a drag on resources could I have been?

Last May, in my post “Apple is Losing Creatives,” I noted that a room full of creatives, historically Apple’s target market, gradually discovered their mutual loathing of the once-creative brand, citing the company’s elitism, the high cost of its underperforming hardware, its mistreatment of manufacturing workers, the subpar availability of games on Apple app markets, and a culture of “you can’t”—or, as I said then, “call it a ‘closed-source business philosophy.’” Free-thinking, avidly-learning creatives hate this sort of thing. So last May I was really confused by the way Apple crushed all the arts in a horrifying ad (linked from the post mentioned here) called “Crush.” After years of posturing as a creative company and pandering to creatives, the move didn’t make sense. Until now.

That magic gizmo I mentioned above? The one that might have allowed me to loiter in a role where I wasn’t excelling, wasn’t really contributing, and wasn’t being called out for it—maybe wasn’t even noticed as an underperformer—that gizmo is an integrated feature in the new IOS 18. Have a look:

After Apple’s head-scratching crush of all creative pursuits, this makes a sick kind of sense. Apple’s new move is to elevate the sub-par, lackluster, mediocre, and blasé. It’s an announcement of the revenge of the dullards.

Why is Apple building a reputation on helping the lackluster maintain appearances? Taken together, “Crush” and “Apple Intelligence” suggest that Apple has embarked on a marketing strategy that panders to envy and sloth:

• “Those artists aren’t so great” (“Crush”).

• “You don’t have to have talent, or even care that much, to look like you’ve got your act together” (“Apple Intelligence”).

Let’s address envy and sloth, but in reverse order. Sloth first.

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Phone-Twiddling

As with my post in May, here again Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (shoutout to

Hadden Turner

, who’s recently read it!) speaks pointedly to our cultural moment. In his second chapter he tells the story of taking his motorcycle to a shop after the engine seizes. It’s too long to quote in writing, so I’ve recorded myself reading it:

The poser in “Apple Intelligence”—let’s call her Smirking IOS Poster Gal—is the latest iteration of the “wrench-twiddlers” that Pirsig describes in this passage.¹ She doesn’t know what she thinks about the book proposal and hasn’t invested much effort or thought in it; she’s just here for the brunch.

I think, culturally, we wink at this sort of sloth on the grounds that we’re overworked. “Since (you think) you’re working too hard for your money, don’t over-invest yourself in your work,” is the work ethic of the moment. I’m all for work/life balance, and this message is coming from helpful intentions. But what if we’re wrong about how hard we work, or about what our effort is worth?

It’s a commonplace in our culture that some jobs are woefully undercompensated. I should know; I’m adjunct professor. But low compensation doesn’t mean the work isn’t still important. And you don’t need to be, say, some kind of teacher, or a nurse, for this to be true of your work.²

If you don’t ride two-wheeled machines, or if you do but you’ve never experienced a seizure, speaking from experience, it’s one of the most unsettling things that can happen to a rider. When the engine seizes, you instinctively look down at it trying to figure out what’s going on; and whenever you look down on a motorcycle, you become keenly aware of how close the road is and how fast it’s moving beneath you. It’s terrifying. And if it happened to you, at that moment you’d realize that no matter how looked-down-upon mechanics are, no matter how little they’re paid, what they do is quite often a matter of either safety or grievous bodily harm, if not life and death. Their work matters deeply.

But maybe that’s not your work. Maybe, like I was in a previous career, you’re a spreadsheet pusher. MS Excel doesn’t give one a very poignant sense that the work they’re doing at their desk this morning is of much consequence. Such work isn’t, as they say, “meaningful.” But it’s profoundly important. When I was pushing spreadsheets, what hung on the accuracy of my data was nothing less than an international student’s ability to get off a plane at Reagan National late one night, drag herself through Metro or a cab ride to campus, sleep, and rise the next morning able to eat a good meal. That counts. A lot. And our office experiences divorce us from impacts like that. If you work in insurance, you hold people’s access to their physicians in your spreadsheets. If you work in finance, you may affect the number of years they yet need to earn before retiring. I get what David Graeber was saying in Bulls—t Jobs, but the underbelly of that line of argument is that therefore, for most of us, work is not as important as we think. And in “Apple Intelligence,” Apple winks at that idea in an effort to get us to consume.

But as Henry Fairlie notes in his monumental work, The Seven Deadly Sins Today, this is sloth and it dehumanizes us:

Sloth is eating at us, devouring all inclination to continue the human endeavor at even the level that has been sustained in the past. For we are reaching the stage at which we will no longer regard ourselves as part of that endeavor. We barely know our civilization any more. We do not read the ancients. Even the classics of our own literature are becoming closed books to us. We make little or no effort to understand our science, with the instructions that it has to give and the wonders it has to show. We allow no authority to the past and entertain no obligation to the future. We do not observe the rules of grammar or syntax. We disdain our dictionaries and let our vocabulary grow slack. We seem to think that we may communicate without bothering to speak accurately with each other, and even without speaking with the complexity and discrimination of language at all… We even think that we can think without troubling to think. And yet we look surprised and hurt if we are accused of being slothful.³

More to the point, Fairlie sees sloth as

a sin of omission… a sin of neglect. We neglect what we ought to do, and especially we neglect our neighbors… We pass by on the other side, partly out of Pride, of which there is a lot in Sloth, but partly out of mere indolence, a laziness of the spirit as well as of the flesh… Our technology and our gadgets have freed us from most drudgery, and what do we do with the time that is now available to us? We turn inward and become utterly absorbed in ourselves.⁴

Or whatever’s on our screens.

I first became aware of “Apple Intelligence” thanks to a note from

Josh Brake

, who read it as an ad “that shows you how you can use Apple Intelligence features to deceive a friend at lunch.” Can these women even be said to be “friends”? Especially when her deception trivializes a matter of great importance to you, could you consider someone who uses their technology to deceive you a “friend”? And if you did this to someone you consider a friend, you’d prove that so-called “Apple Intelligence” is dullard-hood remarketed, a deadness of soul that can’t even overcome itself enough to give a care about those one calls “friend” or what’s important to them.

Fairlie notes that at the root of all sloth “is the despair of the mercy of God, and therefore a despair also of his creation… it is a refusal to be moved, and to be moved especially to any real endeavor, by the contemplation of the good and the beautiful.”⁵ Apple’s no longer siding with creatives, it’s pandering to dullards. It’s playing to—perhaps even inciting—our desire not for a bigger, better world, but a smaller, worse one that fits our shriveled souls.

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Apple Invidia

If you follow both my work and

Myles Werntz

’s, you might have noticed his note about envy this week, to which I replied with another excerpt from Fairlie:

To pit unequals against unequals as if they are equals is to make a breeding ground for Envy. The idea that we are equal has been perverted into the idea that we are identical; and when we then find that we cannot all do and experience and enjoy the things that others do and experience and enjoy, we take our revenge and deny that they were worth doing and experiencing and enjoying in the first place. What we are unable to achieve, we will bring low. What requires talent and training and hard work, we will show can be accomplished without them…

We are giving the name of art to what is not art, of poetry to what is not poetry, of education to what is not education, of achievement to what is not achievement, of morality to what is not morality, and of love to what is not love. We trivialize our conceptions of them all, to make it seem as if we may all attain them. None of us is wholly exempt from the corruption… We seem no longer able to admire, respect, or be grateful for what is nobler or lovelier or greater than ourselves. We must pull down—or put down—what is exceptional.⁶

Yes, I realize that some people will react negatively to his nuancing “equality” and “identity”; but Fairlie has a point. Amid a politics of pride (on both sides of the aisle), humility has fallen on hard times. But humility is exactly what lets us watch the Olympics, or even read Substack, with awe at others’ talent. Sincerely believing that “I could never do that” helps us delight in others’ talent or prowess.

Apple’s old strategy of pandering to creatives earned the brand a luster of creativity; but Apple’s betrayed that affinity by using it to sell, as “art,” that which is decidedly not. Instead of thinking of them as friends, consider the professional roles of the two people in “Apple Intelligence.” Smirking IOS Poster Gal is apparently an acquisitions editor, which means she’s not the real talent at the table, just a bureaucrat. However, she is a decision-maker who holds a creative work’s fate—and thus its author’s as well—in her hapless sway. (Here we could say lots about the vicissitudes of the publishing industry; but that would be a book in itself and would likely have to be self-published to avoid said vicissitudes.) Apple has promised viewers who identify with this smirker that IOS 18 will help them pose. By making her appear to know what she and the author are really discussing, when clearly she doesn’t, Apple poses as a purveyor of superpowers while laying low the real superpower in this commercial: writing talent. Over-against the creative and her desire to create, Apple has sided with the dullard and her desire to pose.

This looks more like sloth than envy until we return to Fairlie, who writes that envy

will not let into its heart the notion that those of us who are only mediocre are not therefore necessarily to be counted as failures; and so it equally will not let into its heart the notion that those who excel can ungrudgingly be given our admiration and respect with no diminishing of ourselves. The envious person is moved, first and last, by his own lack of self-esteem, which is all the more tormenting because it springs from an inordinate self-love.⁷

Apple is pandering to one of the most selfish human impulses, one that sees life as a zero-sum game in which your success means my failure, that seeks to cover my lackluster ability with image instead of the substance born of hard work, and worst of all, that keeps me feeling bad about myself because of my cover-up. In other words, Apple is not only inviting us to lie to one another about our talents and engagement with the world, it’s inviting us to lie to ourselves.

Here I want to return to that job I left on better terms than maybe I deserved at the time. I’m not proud of my failure to accomplish much those last few months, but I’m grateful to have parted on such good terms. Remember, at the beginning of this post my question about that situation was,

what if I’d had a magic gizmo that not only made me look engaged at work, like I was still making a valuable contribution? How long would I have stayed? And what sort of a drag on resources could I have been?

In retrospect, it’s worse than that. That magic gizmo wouldn’t have helped me at others’ expense, it would have cost others a lot while damaging my sense of my own worth even more in the process. As O. Hobart Mowrer put it, “You are your secrets.” See, the more others kept giving in return for my postured engagement and accomplishments, the more invested I’d have become in that posture and the more I’d have had to grapple with the realization that I deserved none of what the gizmo was helping me obtain. Either that, or it would have helped me believe the lies about myself and my performance, which is to say, it would have made a moral dullard out of me.

Dr. Aaron M. Long is a Lecturer in English at a flagship state university, and in Philosophy at a historied regional art school. He has published articles in Twentieth-Century Literature, The Nautilus, and Science Fiction Film & Television, among others. You can find him on Twitter (yeah, yeah, on X) or LinkedIn, and his website is here.

1. Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (New York, NY: Quill William Morrow, 1974), 33.

2. It isn’t fair, but those of us who are overworked and underpaid have but a few options:

1. Leave the job and hand it off to a bright, new recruit who’ll do it well until burnout sets in.

2. Do it well while agitating for better pay.

3. Do a schlock job that reflects our pay.

It looks like the most ethical approach is either number one or number two—even though the spirit of our times seems to encourage number three.

3. Henry Fairlie, The Seven Deadly Sins Today (Washington, DC: New Republic Books, 1978), 128.

4. Fairlie, 129.

5. Fairlie, 125-126.

6. Fairlie, 63-64.

7. Fairlie, 37.